John sat in the shadow of the nameless stone.
The stars burned silently beyond the canopy.
The PIT trembled softly,
its engines barely breathing,
while the massive asteroid turned
slowly through the darkness.
He stared at its surface.
Black rock.
Ancient scars.
A wilderness of stone without atmosphere.
Without sound.
Without any obvious reason to be there.
He reached for the controls.
Three mechanical landing sleds
unfolded from beneath the hull.
One.
Then two.
Then three.
They extended like metal claws
and locked against the asteroid’s surface.
CLAMP.
The PIT settled.
For the first time since leaving Earth,
John felt still.
He released his harness.
Sat beneath the great canopy.
And listened.
Nothing.
The voices were gone.
All of them.
No whispers.
No warnings.
No ancient voices scratching at the edges of his mind.
Only the faint hum of the PIT.
John closed his eyes.
And remembered.
Before the journey John had been a pilot.
A test pilot.
A man who trusted machines
more than people and gravity more than God.
He had flown prototypes
that had never been publicly named.
Craft capable of crossing the upper atmosphere
before most people had finished breakfast.
By 2074,
the wealthy treated space like a holiday destination.
A private playground.
PITs were no longer miracles.
They were possessions.
Luxury machines for those
with enough money to escape the world for a weekend.
John had become one of the people who kept them running.
Not merely a technician.
A specialist.
He knew the systems
better than most of the pilots who flew them.
He serviced the same machines repeatedly.
He knew their maintenance histories.
Their quirks.
Their weaknesses.
Their owners.
And one of those owners was Montague Clarence.
Montague was an old man.
An extraordinarily wealthy man.
The sort of wealthy person
who could buy a spacecraft
and never ask what it cost.
He had owned his PIT for four years.
John had been its designated specialist.
He knew the machine intimately.
Every service schedule.
Every inspection.
Every replacement part.
Every fault it had ever developed.
Then John began hearing voices.
At first they were whispers.
Then dreams.
Then nightmares.
Figures standing beneath impossible skies.
Things with ancient faces and eyes like dying stars.
Voices speaking of Earth.
Of fire.
Of oceans boiling.
Of cities becoming tombs.
Of something coming.
Something old.
Something patient.
Something that had been waiting in the dark between worlds.
John tried to ignore them.
He tried medication.
Sleep.
Silence.
He tried convincing himself
that a damaged mind could create gods out of shadows.
Then came the visions.
Always the same stars.
Always the same distant light.
And one name.
Whispered by the dead.
Spoken by voices that did not sound human.
Nova Centauri 2013.
The doctors listened.
They ran tests.
They asked questions.
They checked his records.
They checked his sleep.
They checked his reactions.
Eventually they made the decision.
Not medically cleared to fly.
John understood.
It was a safety precaution.
If he experienced voices or visions while piloting a spacecraft,
the consequences could be catastrophic.
So he stopped flying.
He became a specialist.
And tried to forget the stars.
Then came Montague Clarence.
John was servicing Montague’s PIT when the call arrived.
It was from Bernie Meyers, Montague’s solicitor.
His voice was dry.
Professional.
Uncomfortable.
“John, I’m afraid Mr Clarence has passed away.”
John stopped working.
“What?”
“Unexpectedly.”
The solicitor paused.
“The estate is being liquidated. The PIT is among the assets. I understand you’re scheduled to complete its service today.”
John looked at the cockpit.
At the immaculate controls.
At the canopy through which the stars could be seen.
Outside, Earth turned beneath him.
Beautiful.
Blue.
Dying.
Then the news came.
War.
Europe.
North America.
Borders collapsing.
Cities burning.
Weapons of mass destruction launched.
The old world tearing itself apart.
And something inside John began to scream.
Not fear.
But recognition.
The voices returned.
All at once.
Thousands of them.
A terrible choir inside his skull.
Go.
Witness.
Nova Centauri.
Go.
Witness.
Remember.
John clutched his head.
The PIT seemed to shake around him.
He could barely hear the engines over the voices.
Then,
Beneath the chaos,
he heard something else.
A single word.
Not spoken aloud.
Felt.
Come.
John looked at the PIT.
At the machine he knew better than anyone.
At the spacecraft that had belonged to Montague Clarence.
At the maintenance schedule that had brought him there.
He knew he wasn’t medically cleared.
He knew the doctors had been right to stop him flying.
But the voices had never been this clear.
And Nova Centauri 2013 had never felt this close.
So John made his decision.
He took the PIT.
He entered the safest known observation coordinates for the remnants of Nova Centauri 2013.
And he left Earth.
John opened his eyes.
He was back beneath the asteroid.
The memory faded.
He looked at the controls.
The voices were silent.
He stared at the enormous rock.
For the first time, he saw it properly.
It wasn’t simply an asteroid.
It was too strange.
Too old.
Too scarred.
Too deliberate.
John released the landing clamps.
The PIT drifted backward.
He manoeuvred around the asteroid.
Then again.
And again.
He circumnavigated the vast body of stone.
Mountains rose from its surface.
Ravines disappeared into darkness.
Enormous fractures ran across the rock like wounds.
Then he saw something.
A depression.
No.
A valley.
No.
An entrance.
John turned the PIT.
His heart began to pound.
There was a cavern in the asteroid.
Not a natural cavern.
Too symmetrical.
Too vast.
John descended.
The PIT slipped between two enormous walls of stone.
Darkness swallowed him.
He switched on the external lights.
The beams travelled forward.
Columns appeared.
Massive stone pillars rising from the cavern floor.
Carved.
Deliberate.
Ancient.
John stopped breathing.
He moved deeper.
Then there were statues.
Dozens.
Then hundreds.
Silent figures watching from the darkness.
Their faces were worn by unimaginable age.
Some appeared human.
Others did not.
Some possessed too many limbs.
Some had elongated skulls.
Some seemed to have wings.
And some,
John recognised.
His blood turned cold.
He had seen those faces before.
In his dreams.
In the nightmares the doctors had called hallucinations.
The gods he had spent years trying to forget.
His hands trembled upon the controls.
“No.”
He whispered it.
“No, no, no…”
The voices remained silent.
As though they had brought him here and had nothing more to say.
He descended farther.
A staircase appeared beneath the PIT.
A staircase carved into the stone.
It disappeared downward
toward enormous sealed doors.
John stared at them.
The doors were ancient.
Older than anything human civilisation had ever built.
Symbols covered their surfaces.
Some he recognised.
Others seemed to move when he looked at them.
He brought the PIT down inside the cavern.
The landing sleds touched stone.
He shut down the engines.
Silence.
John opened the canopy.
And cold darkness entered the cockpit.
He looked back toward the distant opening
through which the stars were visible.
Then he looked at the doors.
He reached behind his seat
and retrieved the emergency tether equipment.
Hand and foot spikes.
He fastened them to his suit.
The equipment had been designed for emergency hull work.
This wasn’t a hull.
This was a world.
Or what remained of one.
A dead fragment of an ancient world.
A fragment that had become something else.
John climbed from the PIT.
His boots touched stone.
The weak gravity barely held him.
He pushed away.
His body drifted.
He drove a spike into the ancient wall.
CHINK.
Another.
CHINK.
Then another.
Slowly.
Carefully.
John crossed the cavern.
Above him, the statues watched.
Below him, darkness waited.
Ahead, the sealed doors.
He reached them.
For several seconds he simply floated there,
one hand resting against the ancient stone.
He could feel something.
Not movement.
Not vibration.
Something deeper.
A presence.
John closed his eyes.
And waited for the voices.
Nothing.
For the first time in years,
his mind was completely silent.
He opened his eyes.
“Then I’ll find out myself.”
He pushed against the door.
Nothing.
He tried another section.
Nothing.
Then,
Somewhere deep within the asteroid,
something moved.
A low vibration passed through the stone.
The symbols began to glow.
One after another.
A line of ancient light travelled across the doorway.
John froze.
The stone shifted.
Slowly, the enormous doors began to open.
Not because he had found a mechanism.
Not because he had forced them.
They were opening for him.
John stared into the darkness beyond.
And suddenly he understood one thing.
The voices had not been calling him
toward Nova Centauri 2013.
They had been calling him here.
The doors had been waiting for him.
They summoned and he had arrived.
John pulled himself forward.
One hand.
One spike.
One breath.
Until he disappeared beyond the threshold.
Behind him,
the great stone doors began to close.
The tether line stretched between John and the outer cavern.
Then the doors met.
THOOM.
The line snapped.
He detached the remaining section from his suit.
There was no going back now.
The doors had closed.
And somewhere far beneath him,
Something ancient waited.
